


Numbers

by heartsopenminds



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartsopenminds/pseuds/heartsopenminds
Summary: Dan knows Phil wants him to relax and enjoy a night in front of the TV together, but he can't help his obsession with work from getting in the way.Why can't he stop stressing about the numbers and focus on the one person who's there for him through everything?
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Numbers

Dan is hunched over his computer, as he has been nearly all day, when Phil pokes his head in the door.

“Hey, are you nearly finished?”

Dan sighs and stretches his arms over his head. “Yeah, I just wanna answer a few more comments.”

“OK. And then do you want to watch a movie?”

“Um, sure. Did you pick up any popcorn earlier?”

“Oh…”

“Phil! Don’t tell me you still haven’t gone to Tesco’s? We’ve literally got no food!”

“Sorry! I meant to go earlier, I just didn’t get round to it and it’s pouring down now, I’d get drenched. We can’t be completely out of food, let me see what I can find.” Phil heads off and Dan can hear him rifling around in the kitchen cupboards.

He turns back to his screen, scrolling through and seeing a few more funny comments he wants to respond to.

Phil bounds back into the room a few moments later, looking pleased with himself.

“We’ve still got nearly half a loaf of bread! I’ll just have to make you hot buttered toast instead of hot buttered popcorn, it’s all still carbs coated in fat, practically the same thing.”

Dan rolls his eyes. “You’re hopeless.”

Phil laughs. “Yeah, but you love me anyway.”

Dan shakes his head and smiles.

“I just need a few more minutes to finish off here.”

“OK, but don’t be too long or you’ll be eating cold buttery goodness instead and it’s not nearly as nice.”

“Yeah, I’ll be right through.”

A few moments later, he hears Phil shout through the wall.

“Dan! Your feast awaits!!”

Reluctantly, Dan tears himself away from his work. Of course he wants to spend time with Phil, but he also knows that it’s not a coincidence that this impromptu movie night just so happens to be occurring right after he’s posted a video.

He pads into the living room and flops down on the sofa, leaning over Phil to grab a slice of toast from the plate that’s balanced precariously on the arm of the sofa.

Twenty minutes later, he’s feeling itchy. He really wants to get his laptop and check on how his video views are going, but he knows how Phil will react. He’s spent enough nights watching Dan staring at the screen, biting his nails raw and refreshing every few seconds as he watches the view count slowly tick upwards. To Phil, it just seems like Dan is torturing himself, but to Dan it’s his way of putting his mind at rest.

A few minutes later, Dan’s nerves get the better of him and he jumps up from the sofa.

“Pause it a minute, I’ll be right back.”

He comes back holding his laptop, and snuggles back into Phil. He opens it up and clicks on the YouTube tab he’d left open in the background.

Phil sighs. Dan bristles.

“Do you have something you want to say?”

“I just thought we could relax and spend the evening together, leave the work for tomorrow. You’ve earned a night off.”

Dan can feel himself tense up, knowing that Phil is right but not wanting to admit it. Instead, he goes on the attack.

“Oh, I’m so sorry for ruining your plans!” he sneers sarcastically. “Never mind the fact that what I wanted for this evening was to eat some actual dinner and then have some popcorn with our movie, but no, it’d be too much to expect you to actually take your turn at doing the bloody chores.”

Phi frowns. “There’s no need to be like that, you know I didn’t forget on purpose. I just got caught up in what I was doing.”

Dan’s voice starts getting louder. “It doesn’t matter whether you do it on purpose or not, I’m still the one that has to deal with the consequences every time you fuck up.”

Phil frowns, looking hurt, but he speaks in a conciliatory tone. “Dan,” he says quietly. “Come on, I know you’re not really mad about the shopping. What’s on your mind?” 

Dan knows it’s stupid, but he can’t stand being treated with kindness and sympathy when he’s acting like a dick. It brings out a vicious side of him, like he wants to punish Phil for being stupid enough and trusting enough to show his vulnerability when Dan’s in this kind of mood. 

“Don’t try and tell me what I’m feeling,” he spits back at Phil. “I don’t need that from you. I don’t need your advice or your puppy dog eyes or to talk about my feelings, I just need you to actually pull your fucking weight around here. Just for once! Is it really too much to ask? God, it’s like living with a fucking child,” he snarls.

Phil looks stricken. Dan knows he’s dealt a low blow, homing in on Phil’s insecurities in a way he’ll hate himself for later. Phil stumbles to his feet, and Dan can’t tell if he’s about to shout back at him or start to cry. In the end he does neither. He storms out of the room and a few moments later, Dan hears the door to their apartment slam closed.

He can feel his anger start to deflate, already starting to be replaced with regret. Why does he always do this? He should be curled up beside Phil on the sofa right now, stealing more than his fair share of the toast and bickering about which character would come out on top in a superhero battle but instead he’s sitting here feeling lonely and guilty and afraid. He knows how sensitive Phil is about being called immature, and he went there anyway.

All because of his bloody obsession with the numbers.

He thinks back to the thrill he’d felt when he’d put up his first videos and realised that a few hundred, and then a few thousand people were watching them. Now it’s hundreds of thousands, all those people paying him attention, interested in what he has to say and shallow as it sounds, that makes him feel good.

He’s spent his whole life not feeling good enough. It was at its worst around the time he first started watching YouTube, when he was overwhelmed by feeling like a disappointment to his parents, a misfit loser at school and a terrible, selfish boyfriend. Even now, those insecurities haunt him, and there’s more he’s added to the list, but when he sees his videos doing well it’s like he’s got something tangible he can point to and say, at least I’ve done something right. It doesn’t make those bad feelings go away, but it does give him a bit of a reprieve.

The problem is that it’s closely followed by paranoia that it’s all going to disappear. What if he screws this up? What if people move on, aren’t interested in him any more? What if his audience starts to dwindle and when he puts out videos, no one really cares? Where would he be then? Just a drop out, misfit, hopeless case who thought they were going to make it big and ended up a failure.

So he has this compulsive need to check, to reassure himself, to make sure that if it is all going to go away someday, it isn’t happening just yet. It’s a comfort in a weird way, even though it stresses him out. But he knows it just makes Phil worry. 

It was so different for Phil when he started making videos because he really wasn’t thinking about view counts and subscribers and success, he just wanted an outlet for his creative energies. He’d spent years posting videos that barely anyone watched, just because he liked doing it and because he was starting to meet some interesting people.

Dan sometimes envies the time and space that Phil had had to work out his online persona without a big audience, to figure out how he wanted to come across and what he felt comfortable sharing about himself. But if he’s really honest, the attention and the numbers were a big part of the attraction for him from the start. If he’d not had the boost that Phil gave him when he first started posting, if he’d put up his first few videos and had barely any reaction, he knows he’d probably have got bored of YouTube pretty quickly and given it up, just like everything else he’s tried to get good at.

Phil just sees the numbers as feedback, a useful way to see what his audience likes and what he might want to do more of in the future, he doesn’t sit there for hours in front of the screen. It’s this difference between them that worries Dan more than anything, that his obsessive nature and black moods and tendency to lash out when he’s hurt will eventually get too much for Phil and he’ll drive him away.

The thing is, Phil might not have the same reactions, might not understand why Dan feels the way he does, but he never stops trying to put himself in Dan's shoes, trying to do what he can to help. It's just that sometimes Dan can't really believe he deserves all that effort and ends up pushing him away, even though it means the world to him to have someone who cares that much.

Just then, Dan hears Phil’s key turn in the lock. He doesn’t dare look up as Phil comes into the kitchen, scared to see the expression on his face. Phil dumps the shopping bags on the breakfast bar and goes to his room to change out of his wet clothes. When he comes back in, he doesn’t say anything, just slumps next to Dan on the sofa.

Dan knows he needs to make the first move, to reach out and apologise. It’s hard, sometimes he feels like he’s apologizing for his very nature but he knows deep down he really doesn’t want to really fuck this up. 

He breaks the silence at last.

“Thanks for getting the shopping.”

“Mmm,” Phil responds, in a non-committal tone.

Dan sighs, then scoots round so his legs are over the side of the sofa and his head is resting in Phil’s lap. He lays there for a few minutes, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what he can say this time to try and put things right.

After a while, he feels Phil shifting a bit, and then the sensation of fingers stroking gently in his hair. He sighs again, and then turns to bury his face into Phil’s stomach.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into the soft fabric of Phil’s t-shirt.

“I know.” Phil says softly.

“Really, I –“

“Shh, don’t worry, it’s OK.”

Dan can feel tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. Sometimes he’s so overwhelmed with what he feels for Phil that his heart feels like it’s going to burst. He has no idea how long this YouTube thing is going to last, but one thing he does know is that he wants this man in his life for as long as Phil will have him.


End file.
